The world is facing fluctuations in crude oil prices as well as challenges to energy security, economic stability and growth. Further environmental concerns related to climate change due to the ‘greenhouse effect’ are coming more and more in focus. Furthermore, a number of conventional energy sources such as oil are being depleted. This calls for a more efficient and sustainable use of resources, including non-conventional and alternative resources.
Hence, there is a large and increasing global interest in new technologies for the production of liquid hydrocarbons from low value abundant resources such as lignite, peat, biomass, residues and waste. A general characteristic of such low value resources is that they typically have high moisture content, an oxygen content on a dry ash free basis in the range 20-60%, and an ash content ranging from a few percent to more than 50% by weight, which results in a low heating value as received.
Technologies for production of nonconventional liquid hydrocarbons are known, e.g. production of liquid hydrocarbons from coal has been known for more than 150 years. Pyrolysis or high temperature carbonization is another well-known route for production of liquid hydrocarbons from solid fuel. Depending on the specific process, the input stream may be heated to a temperature in the range 450 to 1000° C. in the absence of oxygen, drying of the volatile compounds and leaving a coke product. The hydrocarbon yields can be wide varying and ranges from 10 to 75% depending on the volatile content of the specific input streams and process conditions. In general fast heating (fast pyrolysis) and short residence time provides the highest yields. However, pyrolysis is limited to dry input streams, e.g. moisture contents up to approximately 10% by weight. Further, as only very limited conversion of the liquid hydrocarbon produced occurs during processing, the liquid hydrocarbons produced have a high oxygen and water content, and the liquid hydrocarbons produced consequently have a low heating value. Further, the liquid hydrocarbons are not mixable with petrodiesel and petrocrude, and are corrosive and susceptible to polymerization which makes long term storage difficult. This limits the direct use of such pyrolytic hydrocarbon liquids. Upgrading of pyrolytic hydrocarbons may be performed by hydrodeoxygenation or by addition of hydrogen during the pyrolysis process. However, though such hydrogenation processes are technically feasible, they will add significantly to the production costs as no oxygen is removed by the pyrolysis, and production of hydrogen is relatively expensive.
The production of liquid hydrocarbons from feedstock other than coal is also being conducted by the pyrolysis, as well as by indirect and direct liquefaction techniques described above. However, common for them are that they all require relatively dry input streams. A fundamental issue is difference in the stoichiometry of the input stream and liquid hydrocarbon fuels. For example dry wood may be represented by the formula CH1,4O0,7, whereas liquid hydrocarbon fuels may be represented by the formula CH2:CH1,4O0,2→CH2 
This fundamentally results in an indispensable need for hydrogen addition and/or removal of carbon during the processing for adaption of the H/C ratio and removal of oxygen. Removal of carbon as char and CO2 reduces the maximum obtainable yields of the desired hydrocarbons, whereas production of hydrogen is relatively expensive and adds significantly to the complexity and reduces the efficiency of such processes. Hence, to be viable such processes require a very large scale and thereby become very capital intensive (UK DTI, Coal Liquefaction, Cleaner Coal Programme, Technology Status Report 010, October 1999).
Hence, there is a large interest in developing improved production techniques for liquid hydrocarbons not suffering from the drawbacks described above. Conversion of the feedstock in pressurized water at elevated temperatures is a route which has attracted significant attention over recent decades. Such techniques are generally called hydrothermal processing, and generally convert the feedstock into a liquid hydrocarbon product, a char product, a water phase comprising water soluble organics, a gas and a mineral product.
An advantage of hydrothermal processing is that water is kept under pressure so that it is maintained in its liquid and/or supercritical state which means that no phase transition into steam occurs during processing. Hence, the energy loss, in the form of latent heat of evaporation, need not be supplied, and thus energy consuming processes such as evaporation or distillation are eliminated. This renders such processes very energy efficient particularly for wet input streams.
Water, in the vicinity of its critical point (374° C., 221 bar) obtains physical properties which are very different from water at ambient conditions, e.g. the dissociation product of water is more than three orders of magnitude higher, it changes its polarity from a polar solvent to a non-polar solvent, interphase mass and heat transfer resistances are significantly reduced and mass and heat transfer rates are therefore enhanced.
Due to these properties of water in the vicinity of its critical point, water may serve both as a reaction medium, a catalyst for acid and base catalyzed reactions and as a reactant and source of hydrogen in the conversion process.
Hence, hydrothermal processing holds the potential to reduce the oxygen content of wet oxygenated feedstock with lower parasitic energy losses and with less hydrogen required due to formation of hydrogen in situ.
Deoxygenation goes through dehydration, decarboxylation and hydrogenation reactions. However, the reaction pathways are complex and are to a large extent unknown except for simple molecules. Carbonaceous macromolecules may undergo various reactions including hydrolysis, dehydration, decarboxylation, steam reforming, water gas shift, steam cracking, Bouduard reaction, hydrogenation, methanation, Fischer-Tropsch, aldol condensation, esterification, methanol synthesis etc. The rate of the individual reactions and the extent to which conversion proceeds via specific reaction pathways depend on a number of factors.
Processes differ in the specific operating conditions and process design and layout being applied, e.g. the feedstock, the dry solid content in the feed, the ash content of the feed, the operating pressure and temperature, the pH, the catalysts and other additives present in different parts of the process, the residence time in the different parts of the process, the heat integration, the separation techniques applied including further product handling and upgrading etc.
Despite the fact that hydrothermal technologies have many potential benefits over conventional methods of processing biomass and other organic macromolecules into useful fuels and chemicals, the fact remains that these technologies have yet not been widely commercialized (A. Peterson et al, 2008).
An improved process and apparatus for production of liquid hydrocarbons as the main product and not suffering from the problems and disadvantages described above is disclosed by Iversen in PCT/DK2012/000071.
One of the challenges of the previously known methods is the relatively high energy consumption for separating different fractions of the produced hydrocarbon, with the purpose of producing different types of end products. In traditional methods this is done by heating the hydrocarbon produced and successively separating the components according to the condensation points of the various fractions.
The known method for separating different fractions of the hydrocarbon is functioning well and has a high relevance for traditionally produced hydrocarbons, e.g. fossil hydrocarbons produced from sub terrain well or from terrain level oil sand reservoirs. The method is however requiring a significant energy input and hence increases the cost of producing the desired hydrocarbons.
Therefore it would be advantageous to provide a new method and corresponding device through which the total energy consumption of the process would be reduced and hence provide increased environmentally friendly hydrocarbon products, in particular when applied in a conversion process for producing hydrocarbons from biological material.